There’s something about Stand Up Guys that’s both brilliant and poignant. The film, directed by Fisher Stevens and written by Noah Haidle, is the story of a group of men who reunite for a final night of depravity.
At the start of the movie, Val (Al Pacino,) is released from prison, after a 20-year jail sentence, into the company of Doc (Christopher Walken) and Hirsch (Alan Arkin), old friends and ex con men. The finality of their meeting is detailed in the beginning of the film. Doc has been commissioned by an old enemy to kill Val upon his release. About a third of the way into the movie, Val guesses Doc’s intention and accepts his fate. This choice completely diffuses any conflict the friends might have with each other. For the rest of the movie, the group trudges through Val’s last night, breaking Hirsch out of his nursing home. Even as Hirsch ditches his oxygen tank, which is bad ass, the movie clearly conveys the idea that these men are all on their deathbeds. Doc, pleading for Val’s life with the gangster who commissioned the assassination, even uses this as a reason for why he should be spared—Val’s old anyway and will die of natural causes within a “few years.”
There seem to be no stakes. Early in the film, Val reveals that he knows Doc’s objective and doesn’t mind. Hirsch’s death seems foretold by the decrepit state in which his friends find him at the nursing home and flatly accepted by all his loved ones once he passes. Their adventures lack any sort of tension or climactic movement. You have a group of characters working towards the same goal—a final night of fun before an execution—without any conflict.